Guilford Is In “The Times” Again— Yes, With Ayn Rand

Most folks who speak often in public tend to have a collection of anecdotes they repeat to illustrate familiar points. Dr. King, for instance, had a whole stack of sermon passages, which he shuffled like a deck of cards, to fill out various addresses. (Yes, “I have a dream” was one.)

Wendy Brown, academic doyenne, is another, still very much alive. She also has her go-to stories. Not being an academic, I only know one of hers: the tale of the near-broke little Carolina Quaker college which sold its soul to an Ayn Rand-obsessed mega-donor, for half a million dollars and a ten-year supply of her doorstop clunker screed, Atlas Shrugged.

Brown dropped this nugget into a lengthy Times interview early last month, which we duly noted here.

But that wasn’t enough for The Paper of Record.

Brown was back in today’s (June 21) Times, for an additional sizable chunk of their “Talk” section, under the heading of, “Why Critics of Angry Woke College Kids Are Missing the Point.”  And amid her ruminations on cancel culture, classroom free speech and suchlike, she dropped the Quaker college water balloon again:

Here I think it’s time to talk about the very serious right-wing effort to use free speech and freedom more generally as a flag for a political, social and moral project. On campus, for example, the constant harangues about cancel culture and wokeness on the left that you get from the right keep us from seeing enormous amounts of foundation money and use of the state to try to control what is taught, to build institutes and curriculums that comport with a right-wing engine.

Guilford College, this little Quaker school in North Carolina takes half a million dollars from a foundation in love with Ayn Rand. Every econ and business major in the college for the next 10 years had to be given a copy of “Atlas Shrugged,” and at the center of the curriculum there had to be a course in which “Atlas Shrugged” was the required textbook.

This story has been repeated over and over. Then you have colleges and universities not so desperate but nonetheless willing to take large amounts of Koch and other right-wing-foundation money to set up institutes, even hire faculty.” [Emphasis added.]

If Wendy Brown is to repeat this story over & over, maybe she could use another version of it. Here’s one:

In those years I once visited the University of North Carolina’s campus in the scenic coastal city of Wilmington NC, to join a workshop in the building with its business school.

There I turned the wrong way down a hallway, and found myself approaching the business school offices. That stretch of the hallway suddenly turned  brighter, due to a vivid mural stretching  along its walls..

The mural centered on oversized calligraphy, which I guessed was somebody’s famous quotes. Stepping back for a better view, I saw the name at the bottom left: a quote from Atlas Shrugged.

You guessed it: the very same Ayn Randian donor had left their mark (and a million bucks) on UNCW. Students in an art class painted the mural as a million-dollar thank you note.